Word Obsessive

This is certainly a post for writers.
       Editing and rewriting puts you in a different mind-set to plain, straight-ahead writing.

 
       I'm editing and rewriting a lot lately. I've been rewriting the Sterkarm books, for republication this summer, and I've been rewriting a WIP progress with the working title of Bad Girl.

     Rewriting always seems to make me pernickety about words.

     While I'm bashing along on first drafts, thinking only of working out the plot and motivation, I don't bother much about the words. Just slam them down.

      But when I'm rewriting, it all slows down. I become a bit obsessive. I think: would that character use that word?
      Would this word even exist in English at this time?
      Would they use that form of the word? Is it in character: would they use a slangier term, something more official, something politer - or ruder?
      While rewriting, I seem to pick up the dictionary every ten minutes. I'm always worrying about exact meanings, origins, tone, colour...

       A couple of years ago, while in rewriting mode, I crossed the Forth Bridge into the Kingdom of Fife (with my laptop in my luggage.) The Forth Bridge crosses the Firth of Forth; and on the other side of Scotland, there's the Solway Firth. Further north are the Cromarty and Moray Firths. I started idly wondering about this word, 'Firth.' Why, I wondered, does Scotland have firths where England

Aerial view of Forth Bridge, courtesy of Google.

has channels and sounds?

         A firth is a long, narrow inlet of the sea. Which is exactly what a fjord is - hang on!
        Scots English is even more heavily influenced by Scandinavia, and has retained more of the Anglo-Saxon than 'Standard' English, or the English further south. Could there be a connection?

        In 'fjord,' the 'j' is sounded like a 'y' or 'i' while that final 'd' sounds more like 'th.'
        In other words - and say this with a Scots accent -  'F-yuh-rrrrr-th.'
        Firth and fjord, I thought: they're the same word! I think there are few people in the world who could be as excited as me by this. Some very junior lexicographers, perhaps. A few very naive linguists. And maybe some other writers (though, in their case, not necessarily about 'firth' and 'fjord.')
       I grabbed my OED as soon as I could:

                    FIRTH, n. a narrow inlet of the sea. ORIGIN ME (orig. Scots), from ON fjorthr (see FJORD)

          Oh, I was very happy. The identity of 'firth' and 'fjord' is obviously a well-known fact in the dictionary-compiling community, but it had never occurred to me before, and I doubt if I would have made the connection if I hadn't been obsessing about the sounds of words and their origins, in rewrite mode.

         The present bout of rewriting brought on another of these connections. I was reading something by an American, which spoke of mowing the grass in their yard.

        Now, to me, 'yard' has always meant an area of hard paving or concrete, usually quite small. So the area of hard paving just outside my back-door is my 'yard.' Some of my older relatives lived in yards. An alleyway led from the street into a small square surrounded by small houses. At the centre of the square were blocks of shared lavatories and wash-houses. All of the square was paved. It was a 'yard.' These placed were often named 'Something Yard.'
 
          So, for years, when I was younger, I imagined American streets and towns as places quite without flowerbeds or lawns - because they themselves always talked of their yards.

         My mother loved flowers. She had lots of roses, lilies, magnolia and anything else she could persuade to grow. The place where they grew was 'the garden.' The garden was on the other side of the small paved 'yard.' She was happy for us to play 'on the yard.' She was not happy when we gambolled in her garden and broke down favorite plants.
         At my own house, the 'garden' begins immediately on the other side of the 'yard.'

          As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that when Americans said, 'yard,' they might, just might, be talking about a place where they grew flowers, bushes and trees.
          Because my brain's is rewrite mode, and is scrambling restively about among meanings and nuances of words, a casual reference started it off on: Why do Americans say 'yard' where we say 'garden'? And it suddenly dawned on me that, just like firth and fjord, they're the same word.

       I was rewriting the Sterkarms, which is set among the pele towers of the Scottish Borders during the 16th Century. A pele tower had a great thick wooden door. But wooden doors could be hacked or

A raid on Gilknockie Tower

burned down, so behind it there was a door-sized iron grille, hinged so it could be fastened across the doorway. Even if enemies succeeded in breaking through the door, they would still have to get past the iron grille, which wouldn't give way to axes or fire so easily.
        The technical name, among archaeologists and historians, for one of these grilles is 'a yett.' It's called that because, in the dialect of the Borders, the letter 'g' is often pronounced as 'y', as it often is in Scandinavian languages. 'Yett' is the same word as 'gate,' but with a different pronunciation.
       So, I thought, 'garden' may once have been pronounced as 'yarden.'

       And that 'd' in the middle of both words? Pronounce it as 'th', as in fjorth, and you have 'garth' or 'garthen.' Or even 'yarthen.' I supposed that the 'en' at the end either meant 'small' as in 'kitten' or, possibly, it was 'the'. In Scandinavian languages, the definite article is added to the end of a word. So, in Norwegian, 'book' is 'bok' - 'the book' is 'boken.'

         Then there's the word, 'garth.'

                   garth, n Brit. 1 an open space surrounded by cloisters. 2 a yard or garden.

       In Norse Myth, there is Midgarth(d) and Asgarth(d). Midgarth is often translated as 'earth' - Middle Earth, or here, this place where we all live. It's the open space, yard or garden where mankind lives. It's in the middle, because there are worlds above and beneath it.
       Asgarth is the open space, yard or garden where the Aesir or gods live.

       So 'garden' was once 'yarthen' or 'yarth' - which comes very close to 'earth.'  ('Earth' is derived from the name of the Norse mother goddess Jord or Yorth.)

       One more dive into the dictionary.

          yard, n 1 chiefly British a piece of uncultivated ground adjoining a building, typically enclosed by walls. 2 N. America the garden of a house.   ORIGIN OE geard 'building, home, region' from a Gmc base rel. to GARDEN and ORCHARD.

           There, at the end of 'orchard' is that 'yarth' again. (And 'orchard' proves to be one of those odd, doubled words. The first syllable comes from the Latin hortus, meaning 'garden.'  So orchard means 'garden-garden.' Or, I suppose, 'garden-area.')

           garden, n, chiefly British, a piece of ground adjoining a house used for growing fruit, flowers or vegetables. ORIGIN ME from Old North Fr. gardin, var. of OFr jardin, of Gmc origin, rel to yard.

          Don't let those Old North Fr. fool you - they were Vikings.

          So now I know why Americans say 'yard' while we Brits say 'garden.' As so often, the American are using a somewhat older version of the word or phrase.

          That's a relief. I can stop worrying about it now.

Navigating the rewritten rewrites...

          There are tides in the affairs of blogs, and the tide for this one

The Sterkarm Handshake

has been far out for a couple of weeks.
          Partly I've been very busy with selling my late parents' house, clearing it of all their stuff, and redistributing heirlooms. I've made so many trip to the local dump that the blokes down there - a very friendly, helpful lot - have given me my own parking space and put me on their Christmas card list.
          But somewhere in all this, I actually finished Sterkarm 3. Again.
          I was rewriting it because my agent wanted me to make a clearer distinction between the two - yes, count 'em - two gangs of Sterkarms. "We only have one bite at this cherry," she said. "I don't want to offer it until it's right."
          To help me keep track of 147,000 words, I've used Word's 'navigation pane', which is immensely useful. If you've never used it, it's a quick, simply way of putting a hyperlink into a file. A side-panel, or pane, opens down the left-hand side of the screen. When I highlighted a chapter heading, and then clicked on 'Heading 1', that heading appeared in the side-panel.

         If I wanted to be able to find a particular scene, I gave it a sub-heading, highlighted it and clicked 'Heading 2'. It then appeared in the side-panel under the chapter heading, but in less heavy type, and inset - so I could easily see the difference between the start of a chapter, and the beginning of scenes within it.
          As the words, and 50-odd chapter mounted up, so the chapter headings and subheading appeared down the left-hand side.
If I was suddenly reminded, as I worked on chapter 47, of some detail I should have added to chapter 9, then all I had to do was click on the heading 'Chapter 9' in the side-panel, and the hyperlink would jump me straight back there. If I knew the scene I wanted, I could jump straight to that scene. It's made rewriting a hell of a lot easier.
          But only so far. This must be the fourth or fifth rewrite. I thought I would be nipping through and doing nothing more than knocking out the sub-headings, to make a nice, tidy typescript for my agent to read. Instead I've been reading passages and thinking, 'Why on earth did I write that? How can I ever have thought that made sense? Or was good enough?'
          And so I'm cutting - slashing, sometimes - and changing and re-ordering. But I am intent on finishing this spruce-up in as short a time as possible, and will then email it to my agent. I promise.

 My sketch map of Sterkarm country, made of two pieces of scrap paper taped together and scribbled on.

          And this is where Blott has gone. He's out the back somewhere, chasing paranormal rodents round the bins.

 

By Bitter Sterkarm...

          This will be a short post, as I have taken an oath.  By Oak and Ash, and Bitter Thorn, I will finish Sterkarm 3 and have it ready to send to my agent - or will have sent it - by September 1st.
          I know I said it was almost finished, but...
          I had to round up those loose hounds... Well, it turned out, they weren't as hard to round up as I'd feared.  But while I was looking for them, I found a lengthy passage that needed rewriting.  I'd brought in two minor characters to do something that - I suddenly saw - would be much better done by one of the more important characters.  But that means rewriting that scene and surrounding scenes...
          And the ending.  Endings, of course, are a beach.  I am feeling my way through this scene by my fingertips.  There are several characters.  The revelations of the scene must be made bit by bit - but every character must behave in character, and speak like themselves - and it all means going back and forth, rewriting, scrapping, moving lines about...  It's slow and head-nipping.
          And so much of my time is being taken up by other things - e-publishing my back-list, blogging, tweeting...  I could see it all going on for months.
          But I'm a member of an on-line writers' group called Flatcap. We 'meet up' on line most days, to report to each other on what we've managed to get done, and encourage each other.

The Ghost Wife

          I was grumbling on Flatcap about how it was all taking such an age, when another Flatcapper, the witty Joan Lennon, told me to take, myself, the same advice I would give to a novice writer in the same situation.

          Why don't you, Joan sagely asked, set yourself a deadline?
          Well, this is just what Flatcap is for.  So I am taking Joan's advice and setting myself a deadline.  September 1st - no later!

The Wolf Sisters by Susan Price

    I am also coming round to the idea of A Sterkarm Embrace as the title - though I may have to write in an explanation of what a Sterkarm embrace is.
          I have two more e-books out - Wolf Sisters and The Ghost Wife.  Another is pending, but it will just have to pend until the Sterkarms are done.

            Nor have I forgotten the Green Man.  I have got as far as buying a mask for a former, and cutting the side off a large cardboard box to make a working surface.  I've covered the cardboard in clingfilm, so the papier-mache (when I get to that stage) won't stick to it.  When I have finished the Sterkarms - by September 1st! - I will allow myself, as a reward, to have a go at the Green Man.  My brother suggests using cardboard tubes, like toilet roll and kitchen roll innards, to help with the curl of leaves.
          But, on with the Sterkarms...
And Blott, of course... 

Head Mangling with the Sterkarms

Always a cheerie chappie

          Orwell said writing a book was like enduring a long drawn out bout of illness.

          When I first read that, as teenager, I didn’t believe it.  I thought, ‘What an old moan. He’s earning a living by writing instead of in a factory, and all he can do is grumble about it.’

          Now, much older, I realise what a true word the man wrote: and I’ve been learning how true all over again.  Somehow, you always forget.

          I’ve slogged for three years on this Sterkarm book, just working out a plot, and I’ve finally figured out – I think – how it’s to end.

          And I kidded myself that I was now on the downward slope.  One final rewrite , to knock it all into shape, right?

          Right?

          Wrong.

          I’ve been rewriting this past week, with two windows open on the computer – one for the slog version, and one for the new and, I hope, final version.  Copying and pasting from one to the other, and re-ordering, rewriting, changing, improving…

          And it’s been even more head-nipping than before.

          With almost every sentence I’m having to jump back to earlier chapters or pages, because, I find, I’ve thrown in something crucial on the fly, promising myself that I’d sort it out later.  Well, the later is now.  I have to go back and work out where it should have been introduced and, when I’ve found the place, I have to do the work of finding the words to actually blend whatever it is in, without it seeming too obvious.

          Or I realise that I’d forgotten all about an important character – who should be in this scene – but isn’t.  Who would have important and interesting things to say – if I go back and work him or her into the scene – which may mean going back a considerable way to establish their presence.  And then I have to find the words for those interesting and important things they would say, and the right tone – in fact, work out what they’re feeling at that moment.

          Or I find a character in a scene who really isn’t necessary and has to be written out… and the scene patched up around the hole they’ve left.

          I’d forgotten how much thought and concentration – and referring to research notes - this all takes.

         And this is saying nothing about the moving around of whole scenes, the writing of new ones, the new decisions on where chapters should start and end, and the rewriting required to make those changes work.

          Head-nipping?  It’s head-mangling.

          It makes me think of my old headmaster (a maths graduate), who infuriated my art-teacher by telling him that ‘art requires no intelligent thought.’  I am certain my headmaster had never tried to write a novel.

          It’s given me a fervent love of Word’s navigation pane (called document map in earlier versions) which makes it possible for me to skip about, from heading to heading, in seconds, instead of spending an age scrolling backwards and forwards, or opening and closing lots of files before finding the bit I want.

          In fact, I find myself giving thanks again for computers in general.  If I’d had to do all this with paper and pen, or with an old typewriter and loose paper, I would have tipped myself into an empty paper box and had myself buried by now.

          Blott is particuarly relevant this week, as it seems authors are being plagued by a specialist species of internet troll, as Kathleen Jones tells us here, at Authors Electric.

Taming the Sterkarms

My small household gods watch over the plot

          Monday 6^th Feb
 I continue to work on two books at once, trying to plot one, and rewrite the other.

          My kitchen table is still covered with index cards, scribbled in blue ink.  Almost every time I go into the kitchen, I stop and read over the cards.  Sometimes I change the postion of one, or scribble another.

'Odin's Voice' by Susan Price

          I’ve decided that I don’t like the ending I had roughly plotted out.  It’s too close to the original idea I had, too predictable, too ‘left-side-of-the-brain editorial’.  It’s also too close to the ending of my ‘Odin’s Voice’ trilogy.  That left-brain editor obviously thought: well it worked once!  It’ll do again.  No! Not good enough.  So I’ve moved that final row of cards aside, to make space for something new.  Don’t know what yet, though I’ve jotted some notes.

          I’ve got that feeling I’ve had before – I daresay many will recognise it – that feeling that there’s something, some new idea, struggling just behind my forehead.  Haven’t got any clear idea of what it is, just that it’s there, and if I pretend I haven’t noticed, it will eventually come right to the front of my head, and I can catch it.

          I’ve also been reading Sterkarm 3 on the kindle and making rough notes in different colours.  At the suggestion of some commentators on this blog, I’ve added a dog and been very pleased with the result – except that I’ll have to rewrite the end of Sterkarm Kiss – but hey, I’ve got the rights back now, I can do what I like with it.

          I’ve also found a sub-plot that I might or might not keep or develop.  Shall have to see how the rest goes on.

          Tuesday 7^th Feb.  I’m deep into the rougher reaches of the Sterkarm first draft now, scribbling away with my coloured pens – often several colours in one sentence as the different characters meet.  It’s useful to have Per May in green and Per Changeling in red – wish I could do that in the finished novel.  It would be less head-nipping.

          I’ve found a romantic sub-plot which stops short, and which I’m going to have to fix, but I don’t know how.  I’m only mapping as yet.

          I have 22 sheets of scribbled paper, and don’t know how I’m going to see the whole thing at once.  Maybe I’ll sellotape them all together into a long strip.  I suspect that I included too much detail and it’s got a bit out of hand – literally.  Maybe I’ll make a big paper curtain and hang it on my wall – and stand on my kitchen steps to study it.

          Wednesday 8^th  I was doing my University stint and too busy to get any writing done.  And Thursday 9^th vanished in domestic and admin chores.  Friday 10^th is another University day, despite the fact that I didn’t go in because of the ice and snow.  I got students to send me their stuff by email.  So, no writing of my own.

           But next week I’m only at University for one day, Monday – so obviously, I’ll have both books sorted by the end of the week!

          And meanwhile, work on e-books continues.  This is the cover for my eighth, Christopher Uptake.  It isn't available yet - I'm still adding notes and hyperlinks - but I hope it will be soon



And here, as ever, is Blott - 

NAILING THE STERKARMS

coloured pens bought especially to nail my novel

          Now February is here, I have to start thinking about rewriting Sterkarm 3.

          Throughout January I’ve been able to think: Oh, rewriting is the best part!  Rewriting is fun!  The wearisome slog of trudging through a first draft is over!  Rewriting is where you make real progress with a book.

          Yeah – but soon I’m going to have to DO it, which is something else again.  I shall have to confront all those clumsy, clichéd, or unbelievable passages which make you want to go out into the garden and bury yourself.  But, instead, I shall have to try and decide what to do about them.

Just to annoy Madwippet

          I shall have to hunt out all those scenes which I really liked and where I really captured something or other – but which don’t do anything for this book.  And make myself get rid of them.

          And I’m up for it, I absolutely am.  I’ve done it before.  I’ve even enjoyed it.  I’m keen to start, honest.  But dreading it too.  It’s equal and opposites forces – as much as I’m jittery and dancing with eagerness to start, there’s an equally powerful feeling that says: Not yet, not yet.  Wait for it, wait for it!

          I want to wait until I just can’t NOT start.  That’s always worked for me in the past, whether rewriting or starting something new.

          I’m keen to start rewriting for another reason – though wait for it, wait for it – and that’s because I’ve decided to try something new.  New to me, anyway.  Partly out of curiosity and partly out of desperation, I’ve been reading Roz Morris’ 'Nail Your Novel', as I mentioned last week.  I've finished it now, and I remain impressed.  So impressed that I’m going to try the methods she suggests, both for rewriting Sterkarm 3 and for outlining ‘the next big thing’ my agent wants.  I’ve already bought the cards and coloured pens.

Roz Morris

          Now quite often, when I’ve read ‘How-To’ books on writing before, I’ve thought, ‘What a load of faff.  I’ve never done anything like that in 35 years of writing, nor am I ever likely to bother.’ 

          And to be brutally honest, I more than half expected to think the same of Nail Your Novel.  Instead, I was impressed by the down-to-earth practicality of its advice.  I read it thinking: ‘Good idea!  And, yes, I can see the sense in doing that.’  It doesn’t  tell you to complete the exercises at the end of each chapter (does anybody,ever?), or spend twenty minutes each day writing about nothing, or to meditate.

          Instead Roz offers a very clear method – she calls it a ‘beat-sheet’ – of mapping your books strengths and weaknesses, evaluating them, editing them, and shuffling what's left into the best possible order.  Instead of thinking, ‘What a faff,’ I got excited because I could see very clearly how I could make practical use of her method.  It was a sort of super-charged, better thought-out version of methods I’d already stumbled into myself without ever giving much actual thought to what I was doing.

          So I'm going to use Roz’s ‘beat sheet’ approach to tackling the Sterkarms.  See her book for details, but it involves the afore-mentioned coloured pens and sheets of paper.  And a time-line, which I feel in desperate need of.  I shall report back on how it goes.  And also on the plotting of ‘the next big thing’, for which I shall use the cards and another of Roz’s methods.

          I am feeling quite excited to be trying something new.  But
I’m still not quite ready to start.  Wait for it, wait for it -

          Roz Morris' NAIL YOUR NOVEL can be found here.

          Roz blogs here, and on Authors Electric.


          And I've just published HEAD AND TALES as an e-book, revised and with notes added.

          In ancient myth, the severed head stood for Wisdom.  In story after story, the severed head speaks and gives counsel.

          A sick man, a story-teller, dying in a work-camp, fears for the children he’ll leave behind in a harsh world.

          His last wish is that his head be cut off, and carried by his children on their long walk home to the grandmother they have never seen.

          When they are tired, despairing, threatened, the head opens its eyes – and tells stories.  Words have power.  Stories can be spells.

          Here are the stories the head tells…

          And here's Blott  -